It takes two: The experience of stress and associated impacts upon the coach-athlete relationship in elite athletics.

Stephen Pack, Judith Naseby, Elizabeth Scholefield, ‘It takes two: The experience of stress and associated impacts upon the coach-athlete relationship in elite athletics’, paper presented at the Annual Conference of the BPS Division Sport and Exercise Psychology, Manchester, UK, 16-17 December, 2013.Objective: To explore elite athletics coaches’ experiences of stress and its potential impact on the coach-athlete relationship. Design: A qualitative research design was employed. – underpinned by which philosophical standpoint? In-depth interviews encouraged individuals to provide detailed information that resonated at a personal level and captured the subjective meaning of experiencing this implies phenomenology stress in contextual situations. A semi-structured interview guide provided flexibility that facilitated exploration of unique points raised by participants. Method: Six male, UK based, elite athletics coaches aged between 32 and 57 years (46.5 ± 11.8 years), with 7 to 30 years (15.5 ± 9.9 years) elite coaching experience were interviewed face-to-face. All responses were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Results: Data was analysed using inductive and deductive qualitative content analysis. 18 (?) themes emerged – is ‘emerge’ appropriate to deductive and inductive approaches? detailing a variety of competitive and organisational stressors experienced by coaches (e.g. pressure, expectation, conflict and coaching responsibilities), with most debilitative? stress reported during competition. Stress was described as having debilitating and facilitating affects on both the coaches’ and athletes’ performance. Coaches explained how they withdrew from their athletes and coaching responsibilities at times of stress, through changes in body language, and communication. In response, athletes were reported to over-compensate how? , which often resulted in poor performance outcomes. However, experiencing stress was also described to increase responsiveness and productivity of the elite coaches. E.g.? Conclusions: Understanding and responding appropriately to stress in elite sport is paramount.- is this last sentence your focus? Coaches must be aware of how the affects of stress impact the coach-athlete relationship and thus potentially performance. Stress and responses that are below the ‘radar’, and why...Non peer reviewe

Final Presentation to the Library of Congress on Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description

This presentation to Library of Congress staff, delivered onsite on January 10, 2020, presents a tour through the demonstration project pursued by the Aida digital libraries research team with the Library of Congress in 2019-2020. In addition to providing an overview and analysis of the specific machine learning projects scoped and explored, this presentation includes a number of high-level take-aways and recommendations designed to influence and inform the Library of Congress\u27s machine learning efforts going forward

Virtual Wrap-Up Presentation: Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description

Includes framing, overview, and discussion of the explorations pursued as part of the Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description demonstration project, pursued by members of the Aida digital libraries research team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln through a research services contract with the Library of Congress. This presentation covered: Aida research team and background for the demonstration project; broad outlines of “Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description”; what changed for us as a research team over the collaboration and why; deliverables of our work; thoughts toward “What next”; and deep-dives into the explorations. The machine learning explorations, which focus on historic document materials from the Library of Congress, include image segmentation; visual context extraction from textual materials; text extraction from images; document/corpus quality assessment; differentiation among documents created via different means; differentiation among printed, handwritten, and mixed content; and metadata generation. Preliminary take-aways discussed include an expanded sense of how these projects may be useful, with greater emphasis on internal use within the Library of Congress; consideration of how crowd-sourced information can aid in machine-learning, as well as what may be well-suited to the crowd, to the machine, and to domain experts; the need for analysis of the materials through a variety of strategies to inform machine learning; and greater awareness of the full range of resources--computational, human, technical, social--necessary to do this work

Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description: A Demonstration Project

From July 16-to November 8, 2019, the Aida digital libraries research team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln collaborated with the Library of Congress on “Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, and Augmented Description: A Demonstration Project.“ This demonstration project sought to (1) develop and investigate the viability and feasibility of textual and image-based data analytics approaches to support and facilitate discovery; (2) understand technical tools and requirements for the Library of Congress to improve access and discovery of its digital collections; and (3) enable the Library of Congress to plan for future possibilities. In pursuit of these goals, we focused our work around two areas: extracting and foregrounding visual content from Chronicling America (chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) and applying a series of image processing and machine learning methods to minimally processed manuscript collections featured in By the People (crowd.loc.gov). We undertook a series of explorations and investigated a range of issues and challenges related to machine learning and the Library’s collections. This final report details the explorations, addresses social and technical challenges with regard to the explorations and that are critical context for the development of machine learning in the cultural heritage sector, and makes several recommendations to the Library of Congress as it plans for future possibilities. We propose two top-level recommendations. First, the Library should focus the weight of its machine learning efforts and energies on social and technical infrastructures for the development of machine learning in cultural heritage organizations, research libraries, and digital libraries. Second, we recommend that the Library invest in continued, ongoing, intentional explorations and investigations of particular machine learning applications to its collections. Both of these top-level recommendations map to the three goals of the Library’s 2019 digital strategy. Within each top-level recommendation, we offer three more concrete, short- and medium-term recommendations. They include, under social and technical infrastructures: (1) Develop a statement of values or principles that will guide how the Library of Congress pursues the use, application, and development of machine learning for cultural heritage. (2) Create and scope a machine learning roadmap for the Library that looks both internally to the Library of Congress and its needs and goals and externally to the larger cultural heritage and other research communities. (3) Focus efforts on developing ground truth sets and benchmarking data and making these easily available. Nested under the recommendation to support ongoing explorations and investigations, we recommend that the Library: (4) Join the Library of Congress’s emergent efforts in machine learning with its existing expertise and leadership in crowdsourcing. Combine these areas as “informed crowdsourcing” as appropriate. (5) Sponsor challenges for teams to create additional metadata for digital collections in the Library of Congress. As part of these challenges, require teams to engage across a range of social and technical questions and problem areas. (6) Continue to create and support opportunities for researchers to partner in substantive ways with the Library of Congress on machine learning explorations. Each of these recommendations speak to the investigation and challenge areas identified by Thomas Padilla in Responsible Operations: Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI in Libraries. This demonstration project—via its explorations, discussion, and recommendations—shows the potential of machine learning toward a variety of goals and use cases, and it argues that the technology itself will not be the hardest part of this work. The hardest part will be the myriad challenges to undertaking this work in ways that are socially and culturally responsible, while also upholding responsibility to make the Library of Congress’s materials available in timely and accessible ways. Fortunately, the Library of Congress is in a remarkable position to advance machine learning for cultural heritage organizations, through its size, the diversity of its collections, and its commitment to digital strategy

Prime Labelings of Snake Graphs

A prime labeling of a graph G with n vertices is a labeling of the vertices with distinct integers from the set {1, 2 ,..., n} such that the labels of any two adjacent vertices are relatively prime. In this paper, we introduce a snake graph, the fused union of identical cycles, and define a consecutive snake prime labeling for this new family of graphs. We characterize some snake graphs that have a consecutive snake prime labeling and then consider a variation of this labeling

Application of the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery Team’s First- Generation Methods and Software to the Burney Collection of British Newspapers

The current study, “Application of the Image Analysis for Archival Discovery Team’s First- Generation Methods and Software to the Burney Collection of British Newspapers,” is the first test of our approaches—methods and software—to a different newspaper corpus, specifically the 17th and 18 Century Burney Newspapers Collection. This study stands as the first complete attempt at applying Aida’s software and methods to non-Chronicling America newspapers, as a step toward understanding the potential of our approaches across digitized historic newspapers. In taking this step, our goals were (1) to test how well the software and a classifier model developed on Chronicling America newspapers performed on newspapers from a different corpus, a corpus that represents both a different geographical region and time period as well as newspapers digitized at an early stage in newspaper digitization history; (2) to explore whether classification results would be improved by training a new classifier model on Burney Collection images. Overall, we sought to explore how robust and extensible the first-generation Aida approach is and to better understand which parts of our methods might be brought over to new corpora “as is,” and which may need to be calibrated for specific contexts

Prescription Drug Abuse Communication: A Qualitative Analysis of Prescriber and Pharmacist Perceptions and Behaviors

Background: Interpersonal communication is inherent in a majority of strategies seeking to engage prescriber and pharmacist health care professionals (HCPs) in the reduction and prevention of prescription drug abuse (PDA). However, research on HCP PDA communication behavioral engagement and factors that influence it is limited. Objectives This study quantitatively examined communication behaviors and trait-level communication metrics, and qualitatively described prescription drug abuse-related communication perceptions and behaviors among primary care prescribers and community pharmacists. Methods: Five focus groups (N = 35) were conducted within the Appalachian Research Network (AppNET), a rural primary care practice-based research network (PBRN) in South Central Appalachia between February and October, 2014. Focus groups were structured around the administration of three previously validated trait-level communication survey instruments, and one instrument developed by the investigators to gauge HCP prescription drug abuse communication engagement and perceived communication importance. Using a grounded theory approach, focus group themes were inductively derived and coded independently by study investigators. Member-checking interviews were conducted to validate derived themes. Results: Respondents\u27 trait-level communication self-perceptions indicated low communication apprehension, high self-perceived communication competence, and average willingness to communicate as compared to instrument specific criteria and norms. Significant variation in HCP communication behavior engagement was noted specific to PDA. Two overarching themes were noted for HCP-patient communication: 1) influencers of HCP communication and prescribing/dispensing behaviors, and 2) communication behaviors. Multiple sub-themes were identified within each theme. Similarities were noted in perceptions and behaviors across both prescribers and pharmacists. Conclusions: Despite the perceived importance of engaging in PDA communication, HCPs reported that prescription drug abuse communication is uncomfortable, variable, multifactorial, and often avoided. The themes that emerged from this analysis support the utility of communication science and health behavior theories to better understand and improve PDA communication behaviors of both prescribers and pharmacists, and thereby improve engagement in PDA prevention and treatment

Impact of Sleep and Circadian Disruption on Energy Balance and Diabetes: A Summary of Workshop Discussions

A workshop was held at the National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases with a focus on the impact of sleep and circadian disruption on energy balance and diabetes. The workshop identified a number of key principles for research in this area and a number of specific opportunities. Studies in this area would be facilitated by active collaboration between investigators in sleep/circadian research and investigators in metabolism/diabetes. There is a need to translate the elegant findings from basic research into improving the metabolic health of the American public. There is also a need for investigators studying the impact of sleep/circadian disruption in humans to move beyond measurements of insulin and glucose and conduct more in-depth phenotyping. There is also a need for the assessments of sleep and circadian rhythms as well as assessments for sleep-disordered breathing to be incorporated into all ongoing cohort studies related to diabetes risk. Studies in humans need to complement the elegant short-term laboratory-based human studies of simulated short sleep and shift work etc. with studies in subjects in the general population with these disorders. It is conceivable that chronic adaptations occur, and if so, the mechanisms by which they occur needs to be identified and understood. Particular areas of opportunity that are ready for translation are studies to address whether CPAP treatment of patients with pre-diabetes and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) prevents or delays the onset of diabetes and whether temporal restricted feeding has the same impact on obesity rates in humans as it does in mice

The Role of Financial Incentives Along the Antiretroviral Therapy Adherence Continuum: A Qualitative Sub-study of the HPTN 065 (TLC-Plus) Study

The stages of change (SOC) theory suggests individuals adapt incrementally to behaviors like adherence, requiring different strategies over the behavior change continuum. Offering financial incentives (FIs) is one strategy to motivate adherence. This qualitative sub-study examined adherence barriers and the role of FIs to increase viral suppression (VS) among HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN) 065 study participants categorized into SOC-related adherence stages based on changes from baseline to follow-up viral load tests. Of 73 participants, most were in Maintenance stage (n = 31), defined as having achieved VS throughout HPTN 065, or in Action stage (n = 29), defined as moving from virally unsuppressed to suppressed in 50% or more of tests. Only 13 were Low Adherers, having achieved VS in fewer than 50% of tests. The latter group faced substantial social and structural adherence barriers. Participants in the Action stage made positive changes to adherence routines to achieve VS. Those in Maintenance were less incentivized by FIs, as they were already committed. Results from this sub-study suggest FI effectiveness may vary across the SOC continuum, with greatest impact for those initiating antiretroviral or without explicit adherence routines. FIs may be insufficient to overcome strong social or structural barriers, and unnecessary for those intrinsically committed to remaining adherent